Skyquakers (29 page)

Lily had deceived him from the beginning. In her chair,
taped there, was a note explaining how and why.

Ned, distraught and almost paralysed in anger, gently
reached out and took the note, careful not to damage the tape or any part of
it. He read her scribbled words. It was rather long. With every sentence, he
felt Lily
’
s voice resonating in his head. It explained
everything, things which she could not explain over the airwaves, which were
too important to be said out loud. Ned suddenly saw all her reasons, all the
schemes of the world unravelling. This tangled, horrible mess suddenly had
purpose, and Ned felt a chain of reactions now in motion here, reactions which
had been in play long before he ever switched on a radio, perhaps long before
he even found himself locked in a refrigerator.

 
It all began with
Lily, and ended
…

…
with
him.

The letter was signed at the bottom:

Left in lieu of you.

Or, in brief:

LILY.

Very quickly he came to realise how much of a genius the
broadcaster was. Everything made sense now. Ned was satisfied that, despite
having never met her, he could prove she
, w
hoever
she
was, had once been a real person. He found Lily; he would always have that
achievement to claim. What came next depended on how Ned reacted to her letter.
The fact that there was a calendar in the studio, hung up on the wall and
marked with crosses and circles, made the answer so much clearer.

But the thrill of the chase was cut short by the colossal
boom
of thunder, and the earthquake which started afterwards. Ned had to latch onto
something as he began to feel the building shake. The walls began moving, things
on the table began to shift side to side, fall off, shatter and break on the
ground. There was a glass wall looking into Lily
’
s studio,
but it shattered instantly when the walls bent too far for it to handle. The
cracks began to appear. The floor began to feel unsafe.

‘No!’ he cried. Lily
’
s sanctuary
was being destroyed. He saw cables snap. Connections to the generator were
lost. The sound cut out, and suddenly Lily died.

Lara felt the ground under her feet shifting. She looked to
the buildings and saw them begin to bend. Glass began to rain down from the
windows as they shattered. The campus was disintegrating. The whole city was
being blown apart, but this was not just a storm anymore. The hurricane
overhead was humming with a mechanical noise, as fierce as the turbines of a
thousand jumbo jets. Dust began to lift from the ground, swirling upwards into
a spiral over her head. She staggered back and looked up. Above, the epic eye
of the storm was sparking furiously with pink bolts. They zapped things within
their reach: tall trees, the aerials of buildings, causing the air to
crack
with powerful thunder. The beam
–
the one, singular beam
–
had reached its maximum potential, now covering an area three times
the size of the capital city.

She stared, pale in the face, as the first demolished pieces
of Darwin were torn from their foundations in broken chunks, lifted into the
air, crumbling upwards into the sky. It was taking
everything
.

‘
Ho
–
ly
– shit
.
’

Ned, with Lily
’
s letter in his hand, raced
down the same staircase he came up. Around him, the building was shaking, huge
cracks began to appear through the concrete, and glass was bursting from the
walls at every turn. The building was falling apart; he could feel it. The sky
was very, very angry. It was taking no chances this time: no fridge or body of
water could save him. Nothing was going to stop their absolute obliteration of
the planet and every remaining worm that had previously slipped through their
fingers.

With every bounding leap, the previous floor above him
peeled away and was sucked into the sky. Colossal boulders of concrete lifted
clean off and vanished into the storm, while industrial beams and electrical
wiring ripped the place apart. Hurricane-strength wind was now pouring through
the open gashes, while even the stairs themselves were beginning to feel loose
under his feet. He cowered away from the windows as they all shattered. He
ducked and slid as a metal beam crashed down from the disintegrating upper
floors. He was outrunning a vengeful god; it was a race he would never win, but
he ran hard. He leapt down the last flight of stairs and rolled just as
multiple tonnes of debris collapsed behind him. When he burst through the
doors, back onto the open campus lawn, Ned joined Lara and faced the epic
finale of the
Skyquakers
’ wrath.

The eye of the super cell towered over them, sparking with
pink and purple bolts of lightning, and like a drain, it was sucking up the
Earth from its roots. The buildings were being torn up, decaying into fragments
as they became trapped within in the gravitational upwards pull of the eye.
Iconic skyscrapers of Darwin were blown away like sand and were carried up into
the sinkhole. The trees, the sea water, the animals, flailing helplessly in the
air – the sky took them all.

Lara was latched onto a pole, screaming at him. She pointed
to
Moonboy
across the grassy fields of the campus. Ned
knew what she wanted to do:
grab the dog.

Moonboy
, frightened by the chaos,
ran off. Lara ran after him, with Ned quick to follow. They ran through campus
as, behind them, the sky stripped the earth clean. The ground shook. The
blackened clouds were screaming. The scooped-up debris shattered into dust as
it neared the eye, just as Ned had witnessed with people and animals. As the buildings
and the trees were taken, their foundations uprooted as if latched onto mere
strings, so too did Ned begin to feel the ground beneath his feet become loose.
The asphalt began to crack and pull apart. He could even feel it on himself,
the upwards draft, weightlessness. He fought against it to stay grounded,
making sure each and every foot hit the earth with certainty.

‘
Moonboy
! Wait!
’
Lara cried. The little dog ran his heart out, but she caught up and
leapt onto him, pinning the alien mutt to the grass. She spun around and cried
out to Ned. She held out her hand to him, waiting to be taken away from this
place.

Ned felt the ground lifting now. His feet were running on
hovering slabs of thin ice, breaking apart with every touch. He leapt down from
hovering boulders of concrete as they began to rise beneath him, each bound
pulling him further and further away from the crust of the Earth. He
desperately reached out to Lara and
Moonboy
, huddled
together in the storm as around them the city was swallowed into the black
hole. They reached, they grabbed onto each other, but Ned was torn away. The
earth beneath him, the road and the dirt and the roots, was torn up. Suddenly
he was airborne, carried into the sky aboard a plank of asphalt.

Lara screamed his name as she watched him be carried away by
the storm. An instant later, she and
Moonboy
vanished.

Ned flew, caught in the vortex. He briefly looked up to see
the gaping, angry eye, sucking up the city and chewing it all up into dust and
glitter. Like everything around him, his body began to disintegrate. First his
hands, from his fingertips down. He watched them turn to sand and be carried
off in the wind. The rest of his body, his clothes, his face, his bones,
shortly followed. He was swallowed into the abyss as nothing more than atomic
dust, vanishing into the vacuum of the
Skyquakers
.

No one quite knew what to do with the captain. His escapades
through the ship, his attack on his own crewmen, and the contaminated specimen
he released back to Earth could only be explained by his warped mentality and
deteriorating health. Since his capture and arrest, Captain had not stopped
screaming and shouting nonsensical garbage, reaffirming to the others that his
melancholy were to blame for his rampage. He had caused several injuries and
damages to many parts of the ship and its crew, and several areas, including
the animal warehouses and the beam platform, had to be completely shut down and
sterilised following exposure to multiple biohazards. Securities had to be
reset. Damaged infrastructure had to be fixed. The cloud was very delicate and
even the slightest dint could cause catastrophic malfunctions. As for the
bodily harm, crewmen were treated for their injuries, and one was found dead in
the stairwell. If complete madness and disorder had been Captain’s goal, he had
certainly succeeded.

Engineer had to report to his superiors of the event, from
whom he received harsh criticism for being unable to control his fellow
officers and keep his ship safe from contaminants. Too many had died on his
watch, both on board the cloud and in his terrain below. It only escalated
Engineer’s frustration, knowing this would further delay his colonisation
plans. He was falling behind in comparison to other operations taking place
simultaneously around the Planet.

As for the old fool, there was not much Engineer could do
with him. Due to the captain’s complete psychotic breakdown, he was officially
striped of his title, cuffed, and thrown into a makeshift cell down in the
bowels of cloud, as a temporary measure for keeping the rest of them safe. They
chained him to the pipes, naked, and left him there until he regained his
mentality or succumbed to death
–
whichever came first. As a result, Engineer was now the most senior
officer in charge, a position he had felt self-deserving of since their journey
began.

Meanwhile, Captain played the role of the senile, old coot
whenever in the company of others, so to keep up the cunning charade. Inside,
he was well aware of his actions and knew the melancholy had passed. He
realised he had sacrificed his position for his child, but it was worth it
knowing she had landed on Earth alive. Ultimately he had succeeded. He had
managed to cause such a terrible disruption to operations that the culling of
the other native specimens had now been delayed, mostly due to quarantine
lockdowns and adjustments to security. He had Engineer’s child to thank for
reigniting his spirit, but he was back at Engineer
’
s side now
and had not visited him in his cell once since. He saw the boy take a hell of a
beating from his teacher, an act which disgusted Captain and made others
flinch, but who were they to say how one should punish their native? To most,
they were property more so than guides; very few were shown respect or
kindness.

Captain spent his days alone on the cold, metal floor,
chained by the ankle to the water and gas pipes. He was fed rarely and visited
only once by his doctor, but mostly he was left with his own thoughts and the
sound of steam running through a labyrinth of pipelines and air vents. Every
now and then he considered adjusting a few loose wheels, filling the whole
compartment with enough pressure to blow it apart, but he was lacking the
strength and the mental capacity to bother.

Two days into his imprisonment, Captain was joined by
another.

While he slept
,
or pretended to sleep
,
with
his naked body curled up in the corner of the cell, he heard the
heavy doors creak open and two guards in chemical suits stroll in. They dumped
something on the floor and chained it up to the pipes on the other side of the
room. They chatted to themselves about how their crewmen had just finished
clearing a coastal city in preparation for the building of a massive colony.
During the demolition, something small and animal was found entangled in the
atomic debris of the beams. They would have incinerated it, but were suddenly
ordered not to. One deliberated over whether it was safe to keep the biohazard
locked up with their former captain, let alone on their ship in a conscious
state, but the other waved it off and proclaimed the captain should be left to
rot with the rodents. Then they left the room and sealed it tight.

Captain rolled onto his side and sat up to see what the
animal was. He immediately recognised it as a native. He heard it slowly
drifting into consciousness, but because of the dramatic change in atmosphere,
it was struggling terribly to breathe. It lay on its back, gasping for air,
twitching and squirming. He couldn
’
t do much to assist. The pain
of suffocation would last several hours, but eventually it would settle as
acclimatisation kicked in.

The native gasped,
‘
I can
’
t
…
brea
…’

‘Slow,
’
said Captain, calmly.
‘
Takes
time.
’

The native panicked and struggled for several minutes,
taking in big, painful gasps of air. Slowly it came to terms with the lacking
oxygen and found a way to take in slow breaths other than startled gasps. It
lay there on its back for an hour, semi-conscious, going through the phases of
acclimatisation. Once, it turned its head and in the darkness of the cell, it
saw the outline of something tall, thin, and naked sitting against the wall,
watching him closely. The native couldn
’
t make out
what the blur was, so its focus returned to breathing.

Captain slept for a while, with the struggling sound of
gasping in the back of his mind. He woke to the sound of scurrying feet coming
into the cell, followed by harsh demands and loud objections. He woke and saw
Vet, arguing with the guards that he had to see the animal, and that the
condition they had left it in was cruel and unethical. Vet dismissed all their
protests and barged into the cell in a gas mask. He ignored Captain and hurried
to the animal’s aid, lying on the cold floor, pale, dehydrated, and still
semi-conscious. He gave it oxygen from a gas tank, bringing it back to life,
and began to quickly assess its pulse, heart rate, temperature, eyes, mouth,
and blood with a pinprick and a small collection vial. Vet stood and shouted to
the guards that this native was unwell and had to be taken to his clinic, but
the guards had orders to keep it here. When he demanded from whom, they
responded with a term which meant,
‘
The bossy one.
’

Vet, enraged, stormed out again. The door slammed shut.
Silence fell.

Captain stared across the floor at the poor thing, lying
there in the corner. It was getting better at breathing now. Its eyes were
adjusting to the dimness as well, and it could see him in the shadows as he
watched it. It stared at him, terrified, and then curious. On its back, the
animal breathed between its lips,
‘
S-
ky
-
quaker
…
’
It blinked
a few times, adjusting its vision. Without his headscarf, his poncho, or any of
his dignifying robes, Captain’s full body was exposed for all to see. The
animal could not make sense of his appearance, and scorned at him as though he
must be hallucinating. It fell asleep.

The bolted door to the makeshift cell swung open. Multiple
pairs of feet came marching in. Captain receded back to his own corner, as far
hidden beneath the pipes as he could be. Crewmen in chemical suits and gas
masks came back in, but this time they were led by a small figure in silver
sleeved-clothes, a native. Captain knew him as the boy who had helped free his
Lo, but the others referred to him (behind his back, he assumed) as simply,
‘The bossy one.’

With a barking order, Psycho’s two guards dragged a metallic
chair into the cell and lifted the dopey boy from the ground. They chained both
his wrists to the sides while he sat limp. The guards then stepped back to
allow Psycho to examine the captured human sitting before him, head hung to his
chest, shaggy hair covering his eyes. He briefly bent down to see his face,
then spun around to the guards and bellowed at them, in their own language,
‘
You
told me it was a girl. This is not a girl! It
’
s a boy,
you idiots! Get out! Get out, both of you!
’

The guards sulked away and went back to their posts. Captain
watched them leave and snorted at their spinelessness. Taking orders from a
native? Engineer had done well with this one; he had turned his guide into a
miniature version of himself. He had given him power and resources and allowed
him to run his own armies and his own operations, while others of his kind
simply stood by their teachers as accessories to their status. Captain was
concerned for his one, for his own sake. He tried so hard to be loyal, but to
which side? He could see the bruises on his face, the two-day-old black eye,
while his suit hid the other injuries. His gallivanting around with the captain
that night had resulted in severe punishment from an enraged Engineer. It
looked as though he had learnt his lesson.

Psycho, once alone in the cell, briefly turned and looked at
Captain, watching him carefully from the shadowy corner.

‘Hello,
’
he said.

‘You
vanted
this one for yourself?
’
Captain asked, nodding at the poor thing, strapped to the chair.

Psycho looked back at his catch with delight.
‘
Yes.
’
          

‘
Vhy
?
’

‘Well, I was initially told
a girl
was beamed up, but I suppose those idiots aren
’
t
quite schooled in distinguishing between genders. I just thought it might be
…
her
.
’

‘She
’
s safe now,
’
said Captain, proudly.
‘
And you helped.
’

‘No!
’
he cried.
‘
You
weren
’
t supposed to… she wasn
’
t meant to
—’
He spun back to the chair and gritted his teeth. He wanted to touch the
bruise on his cheek but he forced himself not to.
‘
But this
one
…
Oh, I remember this one. He was there. He was with
her.
’
He bent his neck like a curious bird and admired
the boy
’
s sleepy face. ‘
Wakey
,
wakey
.
’

Ned slowly came to. He looked up into the smug, lingering
eyes of a guy with slicked-back hair, dead eyes, and a cocky, teeth-bearing
grin of self-satisfaction.

‘Good morning.
’

Ned blinked and remembered everything. He instantly lunged
for the Suit’s throat, but he was immobilised by the chains.

Psycho chuckled.
‘
You remember me, don
’
t
you?
’

Panic quickly set in. Ned stared around him at the enclosed
compartment of pipes and vents, as though he was trapped in the shadowy engine
room of a large vessel. It was still difficult to breathe in here, but very
quickly he became conscious and aware of the events that had passed. He felt
his heart beating in his chest, rage gushing through his veins. He looked down
and saw he was a prisoner now, captured by a villain whose name he didn’t know,
but whose pretty face he so desperately wanted to pound into the wall with his
bare hands.

Defeated, Ned lowered his head and muttered, ‘You’re a
murderer.’

‘Heh,’ he snorted.

‘You’re a
fucking
murderer
!’

‘
I am a pioneer
!
’
Psycho roared, throwing his arms out.
‘
You
are an insect to me.
Worthless
, all
of you. I can
’
t believe, after so many
months, that there are still little
shits
like you running around out
there. How the hell did you vanish like that?’

Ned refused to say, although Psycho really didn’t care. He
shrugged, ‘Oh, well. Nine out of ten
ain’t
bad. Or
was it twelve? I forget to count. It wasn’t a personal record, that’s for sure.
We did better in Sydney a couple of months ago. Do you know what I did with
their bodies? Do
ya
? Huh?’

Ned looked away.

‘
Nothing
,’ he
chuckled. ‘Let the dogs take care of that.’

‘Stop it,’ Captain said from the other corner.

Ned only realised then that there was someone else in the
room. He couldn’t stop staring.

Psycho snapped his fingers in front of his prisoner’s face,
bringing his eyes back to him. ‘Attention! Look at me.’ He knelt down to him.
‘I don’t care about you. I don’t care where you disappeared to or how you’ve
lasted out there for so, so long. I really don’t care if they throw you in a
pod with the others or toss you back to Earth, but…’ He moved in closer,
pinching his fingers as if holding something small and delicate. ‘There is
one thing
you took from me. I need it
back.’

Ned blinked a few times, but quickly caught on. He grinned.
‘
She
’
s
not here.
’

‘
You
’
re going to
tell me where she is.
’

He laughed. ‘No, I’m not.’

Psycho punched him in the gut. It was a strong hit; even
Captain flinched and turned away in disgust. Ned doubled over, coughing and
wheezing. Psycho shook off the pain in his knuckles and stroked back a strand
of hair that had fallen out of place. He felt nothing, no sympathy. The boy
didn
’
t cave though, despite the pain and nausea
radiating through his every nerve.